The purpose of a university, for Newman, was to ensure that those educated there had “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind”. This, surely, is still the central aim of preprofessional undergraduate education. Whatever discipline an undergraduate pursues, or majors in, it is not so much the acquisition of that particular body of knowledge that is important, but the acquiring, through that discipline, of a sense of the aims and methods of science and scholarship. It is the function of liberal education to make one aware of the boundaries of the domains of the sciences, and give one a grasp of which questions can and which cannot be settled by science.

The person best-qualified to comment on this, of course, is Mark Vernon, whose After Atheism, which I read last summer, I cannot recommend highly enough.I am well aware that many churchgoers regard their beliefs with an unwarranted certainty (unwarranted because, if one is certain, there is no need for faith). I never tire of repeating Newman's definition of faith: "being capable of bearing doubt." To assent or dissent to a belief in God is an act of faith, since you cannot be certain either way.I think that Ron Rosenbaum is not as closely acquainted with the thought of Aquinas as he ought to be. Aquinas, after all, is the one who said that all things runs into mystery, and that we cannot know what God is, only what he is not. The agnostic is not someone who is especially attuned to the mystery of being, since any authentic act of faith must be premised on an acknowledgment of that mystery. The agnostic simply declines to make an act of faith. If agnosticism really involved a reverence for mystery, it would be rubbing elbows with faith -- as I believe Mark Vernon's does.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

I can't ever remember any of my colleagues at The Inquirer talking like this about those they disagreed with. This guy Spencer Ackerman seems especially to revel in posing as a tough guy. Watch what you ask for, Spence.

… there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

I never met Guy Davenport, but he was a friend of my late friend, the composer John Davison. Both went to Harvard, and Davenport taught at Haverford College for a couple of years. John was for many years the chairman of the music department at Haverford. His music ought to be better known.

The author of this excerpt is terribly confused if he thinks that people today have fewer musical choices than they once had. They might have fewer musical choices at Starbucks, but the “increased consolidation of corporate media power” doesn’t seem to be helping record companies or keeping millions of people from discovering music — tens of thousands of songs — from all over the place on the Internet. Usually the concern we hear is the opposite — that there is no longer a central cultural resource, that the gatekeepers (editors, reviewers) don’t have the power they once did, that there are too many alternatives and people don’t know what to choose and we no longer have a shared national culture.

I plugged in something from a blog post, something from a column, and something from a review. The results? In order: Cory Doctorow, H.P. Lovecraft, and Mary Shelley.

Postscript: I just plugged in a paragraph from a review I wrote of Julian Barnes's Nothing To Be Frightened Of and was told I write like Charles Dickens. Here's the paragraph:

However much Barnes may assent intellectually to the notion that our sense of self is an illusion, it has in no way eased his fear of death, and he should perhaps be warned that faith would not entirely dispel that, either. As Newman observed, faith means “being capable of bearing doubt.” The faith that my own chain of causation forces me to profess offers, not the assurance, but the hope that God in His mercy will forgive me my many sins and allow me, eventually, to take up residence in one of the humbler corners of a much better neighborhood of being.

The model in question holds that the universe exists in space and time as a kind of ultimate code that can be deciphered. This image of the universe has a philosophical and religious provenance, and has made its way into secular beliefs and practices as well. In the case of human freedom, this presumption of a “code of codes” works by convincing us that a prediction somehow decodes or deciphers a future that already exists in a coded form. So, for example, when the computers read the signals coming from the monkeys’ brains and make a prediction, belief in the code of codes influences how we interpret that event. Instead of interpreting the prediction as what it is — a statement about the neural process leading to the monkeys’ actions — we extrapolate about a supposed future as if it were already written down, and all we were doing was reading it.

The monkey experiment mentioned at the outset also involves a category error. "The monkeys were ... taught to respond to a cue." Well, the reason we practice something is so we don't have to think about it when we do it later. So being able to determine that the monkeys were going to do something they had been trained to do before they "thought" about doing it tells us nothing.

One thing in particular that Egginton says is especially interesting: "I am free because neither science nor religion can ever tell me, with certainty, what my future will be and what I should do about it." Yes, indeed. I'll start taking determinism a good deal more seriously when its predictive powers become more manifest.

On Saturday, Mark Vernon posted something that seems pertinent to this: Scream for help in dreams. Mark writes that "we're far less free than we think we are. Our conscious life is, in large part, shaped by the unconscious." I have never thought of my "self" as even fundamentally, let alone exclusively, my conscious self. So I don't identify my freedom with my conscious self either. I rather like Georg Groddeck's idea that we do not live so much as we are lived by our It. But that It is us, and it is free. Our conscious self is merely its epidermis.

What I am envious of is that Cynthia is going to meet and talk with the great Robert Conquest. I can't wait to read what comes out of that. (BTW, thanks to having had friends in low places, I knew what a finger man is.)

Saturday, July 24, 2010

... I love this song (it evokes intense personal reminiscence). But let's be honest. It is utterly contrived. "I'm just livin' in a dump like this." Well, Bruce wasn't living in any dump at the time, and never had. "I'm sick of sittin' around here tryin' to write this book." Oh, come on. And yet, as I say, I love it. Maybe because I did live what he imagined. And he imagined it well.

I usually don't get around to it until about noon, though I am usually up by 6. I don't usually wake up hungry and I only eat when I feel hungry. And yes, I do have coffee, but not until about 8:30. The bacon I eat is made up the street by Sonny D'Angelo and has no preservatives. I tend to eat a lot of fruit, and I prefer game meat. As for exercise, it's Chen-style tai chi and walking. Yesterday, despite blistering heat, I did nearly 10 miles.

It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.

OK. Well, here's my move: To begin with, one could argue -- and it seems a reasonable argument to me and sounder scientifically -- that while we are conditioned by our genetic inheritance and early experience, we are not determined by them. Since when do my experiences determine my subsequent behavior? They certainly influence it. Moreover, I don 't see that the notion of free will necessarily implies full and ultimate responsibility. My responsibility and my knowledge are both as finite as I am. My judgment is imperfect, and my choices may -- and often are -- flawed. Get real, professor.

(You may also know, contrary to popular opinion, that current science gives us no more reason to think that determinism is false than that determinism is true.)

Well, apparently Ian McEwan doesn't know that, given what he is quoted as saying in the final paragraph, that the "arguments [against free will] seem watertight." McEwan also says that "I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.” But by his logic he isn't taking on anything. That's just the way he happens to feel, and he can't help feeling that way because he has been determined from the start to feel that way. You're either free -- to whatever extent -- or you're not.

Friday, July 23, 2010

... this may offend. I looked on YouTube for some of the punk bands I rather liked in the early '80s. Real punk bands. Not the synthetic crap that came later and persists to this day. I still have a whole bunch of 45s that I have to transfer to CD. Anyway, this is actually quite funny, as much of the original punk was. Though it is, I forewarn thee, raunchy humor. Remember that these were Frank's wild years. And, trust me, they were quite wild. Just think: You may be so offended, you'll never visit this site again! But there is so much unnecessary seriousness among litblogs. Bet Ed Champion likes this.

Ans jere's something even more offensive (though do note that the speaker could not speak if he met them):

.. great true rocker. What's a true rocker? Well, let's put it this way. I am a first generation rock 'n' roller. Bruce Springsteen is second-generation. Hence, even his best album -- Nebraska -- is in fact mannerist. My buddies and I in high school laughed our asses off about Charlie Starkweather. Hey, give us a break. We were only teenagers. Bruce was 9 when Charlie and Caril went on their spree.

Though Eagleman’s scientific and literary lives seem radically different on the surface, they are part of the same creative endeavor: to deepen our understanding of a complex world we can never fully grasp. Since scientists mostly talk about what they know, Eagleman’s emphasis on our ignorance may seem out of character. Eagleman offers an analogy: The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he says. “During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.”

Blogging has been light because (a) I had a review due that I found found hard to write (only so much space and I wanted to say more than I could) and (b) I just had the first of two root canal sessions. The second is on Friday morning, then they fit the cap. Ah, the pleasures of growing old.

Foreign languages are unsettling. They remind us how arbitrary the mental world we live in is. Silence is worse. When we try to imagine consciousness without words, when we think of a day, even an hour, without any words in the head, we are overcome by a kind of vertigo. As when we think of death.

Sentimentalists try to make up for a lack of feeling by emotional exhibitionism. Men who feel little for women or children often have their names tattooed on their arms; the tattoo says, in effect, "Look what I am prepared to do for you." This is all too often a prelude to abandonment; the man is prepared to have himself tattooed, but not prepared for the slow grind of lasting support, which requires genuine feeling.

The loss of serendipity that comes with not knowing exactly what one is looking for is lamented by ex-Amazon editor James Marcus: "Personalization strikes me as a mixed blessing. While it gives people what they want—or what they think they want—it also engineers spontaneity out of the picture. The happy accident, the freakish discovery, ceases to exist. And that's a problem."

This morning, the intrepid Dave Lull sent me a link to a piece in the Guardian detailing various summer reading choices. Looking through it I learned that J.A. Baker's diaries and another of his books have been gathered together into a single volume that also includes his preternaturally wonderful The Peregrine. I just went to Amazon UK and ordered a copy. All of this seems to me every bit as serendipitous as stumbling upon it while browsing in a book store, which might never happen anytime soon in this country.The notion that the more the choices you have the worse choices you make is risible on its face. It all depends on who is doing the choosing and what mental and experiential equipment one brings to the task.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler write in their book Connected, “One way to make social networks stable is to arrange them so that everyone is connected to a node that can never be removed… If God were seen as a node on a network, large groups of people could be bound together not just by a common idea but also by a specific social relationship to every other believer.”

Jesus said that his kingdom is not of this world. It might be better if more of his followers took him at his word. "... Smallbone is different, he is passionate. He prays intently. His relationship with God is the heart of the matter and we are intended to approve this relationship." It is so easy to think that one's political activities involve doing God's work. The work of the faithful is to pray.

Well, I mean, I don’t mind. It doesn’t hurt me. But for the same reason, I wish it was more consoling. But I have to say there’s some extremely nice people, including people known to you, have said that I’m in their prayers, and I can only say that I’m touched by the thought.

I've probably mentioned this before, but the first book I reviewed for The Inquirer -- way back in 1976 -- was of Anthony Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies, the concluding volume of A Dance to the Music of Time.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

It is still beyond any reasonable doubt that the age of the newspaper, at the very least, is over. Requiescat in pace, but do not weep. Wasteful, relatively expensive, and ultimately ephemeral, there is nothing that a newspaper provides in print that cannot be provided exactly as well online. (Except perhaps the deplorable registration of their high-speed print processes.) And those at the helm are not ignorant of this. Some new business paradigm will be required to successfully meet the demands of a generation that scoffs at now-quaint constraints of old print media: word count, production costs, and distribution.

This is an important piece. It gets to the heart of the matter and draws the proper distinctions. Do read the whole thing.

What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Keynes, Hayek’s friend and lifelong intellectual opponent, called it “a grand book,” adding, “Morally and philosophically, I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it.” George Orwell, more equivocal, conceded that Hayek “is probably right” about the “totalitarian-minded” nature of intellectuals but concluded that he “does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state.”

I'm with Keynes on this, To begin with, he certainly knew about economics than Orwell did. And Hayek advocated free competition, not "free" competition.

Check out Star Wars Kid on YouTube. a chubby boy clumsily plays at being a Jedi knight in his school studio and, fatally, videos the whole thing and then, doubly fatally, leaves the tape behind. The video has been watched 19 million times in its YouTube version and 900 million times in a version with authentic Star Wars music and sounds. That poor boy is Star Wars Kid forever.

I'd have thought, in this era of celebritism, most people would be glad to have celebrity in whatever form it came their way. Oh, yeah, Alec Baldwin doesn't need the bad publicity, but Star Wars Kid could easily take pride in just being known as Star Wars Kid. What is the kid doing that all of us haven't done ... when were kids? He's playing, for God's sake. Just like the people who stand in front of their loudspeakers and pretend to conduct the symphony they're listening to are playing. I do silk reeling while listening to music.
I almost envy Rebney living in that shack on the mountain with his dog. As for what Bryan says about "a very American form of loneliness," I'm not so sure. Some of the happiness moments of my life have occurred when I've been by myself in the middle of nowhere. It isn't loneliness. It's a delicious feeling of aloneness. There are certain Americans who revel in that feeling. And, of course, there are others who just feel lonely, the way one can on a crowded city street.
You can easily see Winnebago Man and Stars Wars Kid if you go to YouTube. I just watched them. Rebney strikes me as a pretty amiable pro just trying to get things right and having a bad time of it. I've had days like that, and felt much the same way.

Blogging has been sporadic for a number of reasons. For one thing, I have been busy trying to meet deadlines. But my blogging is also in a state of transition, reflecting my life, which has also been in transition. Of course, everyone's life is always in transition. Life, like the weather, is a chaotic system.But patterns do emerge. In my case I am only now beginning to settle into a routine replacing the one I had followed for so many years when I was employed. I think I tried to maintain a simulacrum of that after I retired, and I don't think that was a good idea. Actually, it wasn't an idea at all, just a mater of reflex, a habit. Underneath lay a certain anxiety, an unsureness over what exactly I should do next.Lately, I have found myself, for some reason, feeling more relaxed, prepared to do at any moment whatever it occurs to me to do at that moment. I also find myself more open to improvisation, with less of a need to follow any clear and distinct plan of operation.I think this change will start to be reflected more and more on this blog. Which is good. If anything should reflect one's life as one lives it, a blog of this sort should.

"The release of the emails was a turning point, a game-changer," said Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. "The community has been brought up short by the row over their science. Already there is a new tone. Researchers are more upfront, open and explicit about their uncertainties, for instance."

Update (vis the intrepid Dave Lull): 'Climategate' review clears scientists of dishonesty over data.This doesn't bother me and doesn't preclude the outcome mentioned in the earlier link. I don't want Phil Jones persecuted. I think that he 's basically a good man and a good scientist. And he's acknowledged mistakes. Now, Michael Mann of Penn State? I don't put him on a par with Jones. But the point of all this is not to get even with people, but to clear the way for discovery of the truth.(Bumped.)

I object to boiling lobsters both because it is unnecessarily cruel and because it isn't the best way to cook them. Lobsters should be steamed. I don't think they can live at a temperature higher than 98 degrees. Steaming puts them into a gentle, fatal sleep. It also does not cause adrenalin to rush through their bodies, as dropping them into boiling water does -- which is turn makes the flesh tougher and less sweet.

BTW, I think Scott is right: There is something creepy about the Lobster Zone.

I haven't read the book, but I get the impression that the rambling discursiveness the reviewer complains of is simply indicative that it is an old man's book. The very last books of John Cowper Powys had the same quality. We should learn to appreciate this, not be put off by it.

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

Whoever wrote this headline ought to learn to think, period. He could start by getting his terms clear. I doubt if anyone would deny that our choices are influenced by all sorts of things. Influence, however, is not determination. Nor do many people doubt that all sorts of mental processes take place unconsciously. No one who writes would deny that. Nor is it necessarily so that, in order to be free, a choice must be conscious.

Almost every major idea in conventional economics fails under the modification of some assumption, or what is called "perturbation", where you change one parameter or take a parameter henceforth assumed to be fixed and stable by the theory, and make it random.

Sunday, July 04, 2010

... I failed to include my friend Susan's review in my list of Inquirer reviews (inadvertent, because when I did the post, it wasn't on the page): 'The Nobodies Album': A mystery, and so much more. (Hat tip to Dave Lull, who can find anything on the web, God bless him - you owe Dave one, Susan).

As Maynard Keynes put it: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

But I don't like the word fundamentalist used as Mark uses it. I think it should be used to refer to the movement in favor of "the fundamentals" of Christianity that started, if memory serves, at the Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1920s. That some calling themselves "fundamentalists" may be deplorable does not mean the idea behind fundamentalism is deplorable. We should try to go easy on the pejoratives.